Use the Kettle Translator

Warning: This procedure involves downloading and compiling source code. The program you build will not be covered by standard Pentaho support agreements. If you want to translate message bundles without compiling from source, you can simply search for messages_en_US.properties files within the data-integration-client directory (including all of the JARs therein), as explained in Design Tool Localization. Properties files can be inserted into JARs without invalidating your support agreement; you can also override those JARs with directories in the PDI classpath.

Pentaho Data Integration has thousands of translatable strings. Because there are so many, and the number of strings increases with each new step and entry, Pentaho provides a graphical translation tool to make the process easier.

Before commencing a translation project, check to make sure the target language isn't already available. PDI already has complete or partially-complete translations for the following locales:

en_US

it_IT

fr_FR

ja_JP

es_AR

ko_KR

zh_CN

de_DE

es_ES

pt_BR

nl_NL

pt_PT

Additionally, there are certain translation rules and guidelines for some languages. You may need to search for the current rules and guidelines for the language you are using.

Run the translator tool (Translator.bat on Windows; translator.sh on Linux) in the root directory of the PDI source code that you checked out. The translator GUI will come up.

In the upper left pane, select (or create) the locale to translate into.

In the large left pane, select the package name to work on. Packages are color coded. Light grey means there are between 1 and 5 missing keys; dark grey means there are 6-10; yellow means 11-25; orange means 26-50; and red packages have more than 50 keys that are missing translations for the selected locale. Once you select a package, the translatable keys list will populate.

Select a key from the Todo list: pane in the middle of the window.

Type in the translated text in the Translation: pane on the right, then click Apply.

When you've completed your translation effort, click Save.

If you intend to contribute your translations back to the Kettle project, you can commit them back to the source tree, or you can click the Zip button in the translator interface to collect all of the new translated message files into a single zip archive. You can email this archive to the Kettle project lead at mcasters@pentaho.org

Note: Pentaho Data Integration is open source software, and represents the contributions of many people. The project maintainers ask that you contribute back any localized message bundles that you create.

In order to use PDI with these translated messages, you must recompile it from the source you checked out.

ant -f build.xml clean targz

If you've translated all of the available keys, then PDI should be entirely localized for your target language. Any untranslated keys will fall back to its superset language (messages_fr_FR.properties will fall back to messages_FR.properties), and as a last resort, to messages_en_US.properties.